Crealyticshttps://crealytics.com
We enable leading international e-commerce companies to drive performance in product advertising and Paid Search globally in more than 20 languagesThu, 17 Aug 2017 09:46:09 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.1How competitive intelligence can maximize your ROAShttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/08/15/competitive-intelligence-can-maximize-roas/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/08/15/competitive-intelligence-can-maximize-roas/#respondTue, 15 Aug 2017 13:35:51 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14750Digital advertising spend in retail eclipses all other industries, but at such a substantial cost, everyone selling online wants to know how they can boost their return on ad spend (RoAS). eMarketer reported in 2016 that retailers spent $16 billion on paid digital advertising and forecasted that figure would jump to $23 billion by 2020.

Digital advertising spend in retail eclipses all other industries, but at such a substantial cost, everyone selling online wants to know how they can boost their return on ad spend (RoAS). eMarketer reported in 2016 that retailers spent $16 billion on paid digital advertising and forecasted that figure would jump to $23 billion by 2020.

Marketers in retail have a wide range of responsibilities to get customers in the physical or virtual door, such as driving brand awareness, customer loyalty, and retention. The role also covers increasing website and in-store traffic and multi-channel growth. Not to mention, development and management of best-in-class eCommerce and integrated marketing strategies that increase the retailer’s digital footprint.

All of these central tasks that make up a marketer’s role in retail all boil down to traffic and conversions. The questions that keep retail marketers up at night include: are we getting enough traffic to hit our sales and revenue projections? If not, how do we drive more people to our stores and website to buy? Digital advertising helps with this, but with the massive amount retailers are pouring into ads, maximizing the return on that ad spend is only half of the challenge. The other side is from a competitive intelligence standpoint. All retail marketers should ask themselves often: do we have a good idea of what our true tier one competitors are doing from a marketing perspective?

How competitive intelligence impacts advertising

Any retail strategy is lacking without competitive intelligence. Why shoot in the dark, if you could mine competitive insights and operate with full knowledge? Competitive intelligence helps retailers improve their ads with competitor assortment, pricing, and trend analysis.

Competitive intelligence tells you if you’re bidding on the correct keywords when it comes to your ads. Performing competitive keyword research shows how competitors are describing and categorizing their products. Word choice and taxonomy matter. For example, are you bidding on an ad for a coffee maker, but your competitor is calling the same product an espresso maker? You could be bidding on the wrong keywords and you won’t know until you spend a bit of time digging into what your competitors are devoting their ad spend to.

Once you gain that crucial competitive intelligence, your subsequent strategy across channels needs to be aligned. When all channels integrate what competitors are up to and what that could mean for the future, then you’ll have a strategy that will boost your RoAS. The larger the retailer, the bigger potential impact this has. Implementing competitive intelligence into your ad strategy means that as you scale your ad spend and grow your business, you can continue to see an increasing boost in return.

Assortment insights

Knowing what competitors carry is important. After all, there could be a hot new category that you haven’t considered that could be boosting your bottom line like no other. It takes competitive intelligence to fully understand how your assortment stacks up and new brands or categories you could add to compete on a more even playing field with your top competitors. That way, you can create ads that consumers are excited about and drive revenue.

Assortment optimization is an on-going process because it’s never static. There are always new products and brands popping up or gaining popularity that are worth considering. Beyond which products you choose to stock, competitive intelligence can also support merchandising efforts by analyzing past and present trends. That way you can lay out your store or website properly to offer effective and timely promotions and discounts. When you feature the right products in your ads at the right prices, then you can get inventory moving to make room for newer items.

When it comes to assortment, competitive intelligence is helpful because knowing when competitors are out of stock puts you at a distinct advantage. Say a competitor runs out of a particular popular shirt, you could raise your price or spend less promoting the ad since they’re out of the race until they can restock.

Pricing data

No one wants to waste ad spend, but when you aren’t aware of how much competitors are pricing in common or like products, then you might as well be throwing that money into the toilet. Context matters quite a bit when it comes to pricing intelligence. If you aren’t the only seller of a certain product, then knowing how your price ranks is required for effective product listings, and especially for ads.

The truth about digital advertising is that it doesn’t always convert, but optimizing the pricing on your ads will help improve conversion rates. Crealytics found that 10% of products drive 60% of traffic. In a study of 3,900 products and five million impressions on Google Shopping, Crealytics noticed that cheaper products garnered 4.3 million impressions, compared to 1.8 million for expensive items.

This trend extended to clicks and conversion rates as well. While there are only a few cases in which you’d want all your prices to be incredibly low compared to competitors, figuring out the 10% of products that are driving your ad traffic will give you a good idea of which ones you should advertise at a low price to get shoppers to your site. You’ll want to compare those prices with competitors’ to make sure your price isn’t too low. Just a small percent lower than a competitor will help convert customers. Then you can raise prices on supplementary items to make up any margin you may have lost.

Forecasting

Keeping up is no longer good enough in online retail. With competitors just a click away, staying ahead of the curve is a requirement. Competitive intelligence helps with this in that it makes it possible to accomplish more accurate business modeling based on current and historical trends. When you have the data to back up your decisions about assortment and pricing, you can go forward confidently with a comprehensive strategy. And it doesn’t stop there, developing effective advertising strategies requires frequent data mining and analyzing to make sound decisions throughout the calendar year.

Final thoughts

The goal post for improving RoAS is seeing an uptick in traffic and conversions for key brands without upping your spend. You want to meet (hopefully exceed!) your revenue projections and the only way to accomplish that is by keeping up with what the market at large and competitors are doing. The first step to improving your RoAS is gaining access to competitive intelligence and the second is implementing it into a new and improved ad strategy. The road to optimization is never over, which makes this a fun challenge for marketers in the retail space.

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/08/15/competitive-intelligence-can-maximize-roas/feed/03 Best Practices for Dynamic Remarketing Adshttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/25/3-best-practices-dynamic-remarketing-ads/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/25/3-best-practices-dynamic-remarketing-ads/#respondTue, 25 Jul 2017 11:06:04 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14731With Audience Targeting dominating the foreseeable future of Search Engine Ads, familiarizing yourself with Retargeting Options may be useful. Dynamic Remarketing Ads can massively improve your performance by allowing you to help build leads and sales by bringing previous visitors back, who may have left at different stages of the transaction. Before we get to

With Audience Targeting dominating the foreseeable future of Search Engine Ads, familiarizing yourself with Retargeting Options may be useful. Dynamic Remarketing Ads can massively improve your performance by allowing you to help build leads and sales by bringing previous visitors back, who may have left at different stages of the transaction. Before we get to some of the best practices for utilizing Dynamic Remarketing Ads, let’s take a step back, and recap what they are.

What are Dynamic Remarketing Ads?

Since the release of Dynamic Remarketing Ads back in 2013, marketers are able to re-engage with former site visitors with highly customized ads displaying the same and/or similar products they previously looked at. The aim, of course, is to convert them into customers.

So, while prospects are still in the early stages of their purchase, you get to continue engaging with them with tailored messages.

How to get your Dynamic Remarketing Ads going?

First of all, link your AdWords account with your Google Merchant Account in order to provide a product feed. Next, create a display campaign and connect your feed to the campaign. This would avoid the necessity of uploading images and banners.

It’s necessary to implement a tracking code on your website, which can be either an AdWords or a Google Analytics tag. Choose a layout and create your Dynamic Remarketing Ads.

Finally, associate your Audience lists to the appropriate products.

For a more detailed Step-by-Step Guide on how to set up Dynamic Remarketing Ads click here.

Now that you have an idea of how Dynamic Remarketing Ads work, these 3 tips below will highlight how to best implement them:

Dynamic Remarketing Ads: Best Practices

Test different Ad Copies

When you are just starting off with Dynamic Remarketing Ads, it can be confusing to choose from a variety of different Ad Layouts. Setting up an A/B test allows you to see which layouts perform best. Make sure to give this test appropriate time to run to get accurate results. Around 30-90 days should allow you to see if the data collected is statistically significant.

This time estimates mainly vary due to the size of your account, as for smaller accounts, it might take longer to collect enough data.

Place Bids based on where your customer is on the funnel

If a customer is visiting your page for the first time, they are most likely just starting their research about a product, and have no intention to make a purchase. Accordingly, you should place lower bids on these targets. Whereas, bids on cart abandoners should be higher, as they are further down the funnel.

Also, you can evaluate placements and optimize subsequently for the ones that perform better.

Use Dynamic Remarketing Ads to promote Seasonal Events

You can use Dynamic Remarketing Ads to promote Seasonal Events such as Christmas, Black Friday, Sales, or even the Restocking of a popular product. Ensure that your products and messages reflect the season, and what the customers may be looking for each season. This will almost certainly boost your conversions.

Remember, Dynamic Remarketing Ads allows you to stay in conversation with the customer. This engagement will lead to increased brand awareness, eventually leading to higher conversation rate. Don’t miss out on this great tool, and get your first Dynamic Remarketing Campaign going.

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/25/3-best-practices-dynamic-remarketing-ads/feed/0eCommerce Café: Paul Shapirohttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/21/ecommerce-cafe-paul-shapiro/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/21/ecommerce-cafe-paul-shapiro/#respondFri, 21 Jul 2017 13:46:47 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14680Paul is considered one of today’s most notable experts in the SEO world, and as Director of Strategy and Innovation at Catalyst, he regularly shares his key findings at events, webinars, and his blog. We were lucky to catch him at SMX Advanced and hear how he is leveraging data to surge ahead in his

Paul is considered one of today’s most notable experts in the SEO world, and as Director of Strategy and Innovation at Catalyst, he regularly shares his key findings at events, webinars, and his blog. We were lucky to catch him at SMX Advanced and hear how he is leveraging data to surge ahead in his digital strategy.

Full Transcript

ANDREAS: Paul, great to have you here. You’re working for Catalyst. Can you explain a little bit more what Catalyst does and what your role at Catalyst is?

PAUL: Sure. So, Catalyst is a full feature search and social agency. So, we manage SEO, SEM, page social for mostly fortune 500 clients. My role at Catalyst is, my title is the director of strategy and innovation. I have an SEO background, but I’ve sort of moved into this role for a more analytics and technology focus. So, I try to roll out new technology and bring that to our clients, and try to think of new and innovative ways to bring ads to them.

ANDREAS: At Crealytics, we mainly work with retailers. So, our audience is probably also quite retail-oriented. So, could you explain to us a little bit how you approach SEO for ecommerce retailers?

PAUL: Sure. So, SEO for ecommerce retailers is pretty interesting. I think it’s one of the most interesting SEO you can do in particular, just because you’re dealing with these massive, massive websites. And again, quite complicated. Often times you have these issues with crawling, so how does Google crawl the pages. You do these things where Google spent a lot of time crawling relevant search pages or category pages that are no longer existing, and then they never get to these important product pages. So I think, for SEO, investing in log file analysis is hugely important for ecommerce. Investing in information architecture, make sure you have that damn solid, hugely important. And also, I think ecommerce is one of the few verticals where you can really leverage the A/B testing, and A/B testing is a little bit more complicated when it comes to SEO, but because you have so many pages, you can, sort of, reach the statistical significance, or near statistical significance a little bit faster. So ecommerce is a great candidate for A/B testing.

ANDREAS: Maybe a silly question from a paid search guy – what we do usually is, we can estimate pretty accurately what we have to bid on a certain keyword in order to get to a higher position. In the SEO world, this means there is time and effort related towards optimizing certain keywords. Is it possible to estimate the impact of what you’re doing so that you know what return on effort you get on certain activities?

PAUL: Sure. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, there’s forecasting models you can apply, there’s an understanding of what is the search volume on a certain keyword, and we know that there’s different click through rates at different ranks. And all factored into forecasting and piling that in with your existing analytics – how much revenue are we already generating at this position, and how much could we benefit from this sort of change?

ANDREAS: And how do you leverage data from paid search, for example, in order to prioritize things? So, what data do you take and how do you actually use it?

PAUL: Yeah, I love using paid search data, personally. Just using, if you’re doing keyword research, like a search query report, that’s an excellent source of keyword information, in terms of affecting change with paid search data. Using paid search as a sort of a A/B testing platform before you go full-feature SEO based test, to sort of inform what sort of changes you’re making. Also, we went through a client where actually completely re-architected their navigation based on some of the things we were seeing with their paid search data, and it led to a huge SEO win for us.

ANDREAS: So, assume you have access to the paid search accounts, and you see all the data, is this everything you would have thought about, doing your SEO job, or are there any other aspects where you have to be close to the PPC team and closely connected?

PAUL: Synergy is key. There’s no reason to be working in silos. And sometimes paid search sees things much more quicker than an SEO person might see. And the opposite is true. Sometimes the SEO people will see things where the paid search team doesn’t see.

ANDREAS: What could this be?

PAUL: SEO people tend to be much closer to the site and how the actual site is being implemented. So an SEO person might see well a certain feature isn’t working on the site just because they’re so close to the actual mechanics of the page, and also that’s affecting your conversions on the landing page and whatnot, and then the SEO usually has a bigger hand in the actual copy of the webpage, and that affects quality scores significantly. Just doing SEO optimizations on the landing page, for instance, we’ve seen huge productions in CPC on the paid search end.

ANDREAS: So, when you close a deal with a new client and you launch paid search and SEO, what does the team usually look like? How does Catalyst service retail clients?

PAUL: Sure. Teams vary according to the retailer’s needs. Usually on the paid search end, we have someone who leads the business, so an account manager, that type of role. And then we have, on the paid search team, we have the account lead. On the SEO team we have an account lead. And there’s a series of managers and lower-tier staff that work with them. So, sometimes we pile in a data analyst that works across all of those, and everyone tries to communicate with one another. And sometimes we have project managers. I think ecommerce in particular, I think we probably leverage our project manager just because of the size and breadth of it, an ecommerce client.

ANDREAS: What kind of tools and technologies is Catalyst using, and how important is this? So, can you do a similarly good job without any tools and tech, or are you dependent on, do you actually need to leverage technology?

PAUL: I mean, I’m a tech guy. I rely heavily on tech. We have our own set of in-house tools. Often times those rely on 3rd party tools like you guys, and we integrate those into our own tools. But, yeah, we use a myriad of different things, and often times those tools come in with whatever client we’re using, and we stick to their existing stack, or we’ll recommend something that we think would work for them.

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/21/ecommerce-cafe-paul-shapiro/feed/0Five Questions to Help You Navigate the Social Trifectahttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/21/five-questions-help-navigate-social-trifecta/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/21/five-questions-help-navigate-social-trifecta/#respondFri, 21 Jul 2017 09:44:58 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14704If you’re in digital marketing, you know about it. If you’re a marketing diva, you probably named it. The Social Trifecta. Cue the lights! And the trumpet players. The social trifecta is the convergence of three entities within Social Media: Owned, Paid, and Earned. To be clear, this triad is not new; Kirk Cheyfitz

If you’re in digital marketing, you know about it. If you’re a marketing diva, you probably named it. The Social Trifecta.

Cue the lights! And the trumpet players.

The social trifecta is the convergence of three entities within Social Media: Owned, Paid, and Earned. To be clear, this triad is not new; Kirk Cheyfitz prophesied the impact of all three back in 2010…and well, per usual many things have changed since then. According to Gartner, “Eighty percent of social marketers surveyed say they have or will have social advertising programs, and nearly two-thirds will have employee and/or customer advocacy programs in place within 12 months [October 2017],” pointing to a prompt adoption rate and crossover from Owned to Paid and Earned.

Even so, social media advertising itself has grown by 185% over the last year, a never-ending proliferation in media and a clear indication all entities must be intertwined to successfully master your brand’s social media strategy. We now find ourselves with an infinite combination to circulate across across each channel. Yes, omnichannel has further widened its lanes and added a roundabout or five.

The DL:

Owned: What you (as a brand) say on your channels, including all posts on your page

Paid: What you pay to amplify and target

Earned: What your audience says about you

Interestingly enough, the opportunity for creative juices to flow is where the three intersect, a ball pit for marketers to recirculate, promote, test, or simply create content in more ways than one within their social media strategy.

One point to note is how much weight Earned Media holds in the Social Trifecta. Tracx discovered 70% of social conversations revolving around a brand reside in Earned Media, and depending on sentiment, are repurposed across Paid and Owned. Not the mention, Earned Media is the most trusted form of media for audiences, somewhat of a no-brainer as we know customer reviews impact a buyer decision by 80%. It also explains why influencer marketing has taken up a storm in terms of efficacy. Fundamentally, the sheer quantity of chatter in Earned Media, coupled with the quality behind attention capture, is why Earned social delivers four time the brand lift of owned media.

Now Owned isn’t dead, but consider it a senior citizen. Updated newsfeed algorithms now dictate when your posts are viewed—on Facebook, only 2-6% of page followers will see Owned content. Even so, 90% of social buzz on a specific brand don’t even follow that brands’ owned pages. A huge disparity like this one compromises overall visibility, which explains the aforementioned 80% of social marketers moving to Paid or Earned in the last year.

So with all of this being said, how do you successfully leverage the Social Trifecta? With the numerous route available, how do you manage to deliver the best content, effectively connect with target audiences, and of course, minimize costs? Below are some questions to help you navigate throughout the process. Keep in mind, where you spend your time within the Social Trifecta is contingent on your vertical and who your customers are.

Key questions to shape your Social Trifecta strategy:

Where is the watering hole? What is the go-to channel your target audiences are talking on?

What is generating the most buzz in Earned Media that is worth re-purposing into a campaign as Owned Media?

Which posts are absolutely slaying in Owned Media? Are they worth paying for exposure and will they strengthen your brand image and/or inspire a dialogue?

How are your competitors doing, and how are you measuring up to them? Is it okay to be creepy? Yes, yes it is.

What is it about successful posts that make them so? How can you use these takeaways to ensure you continue creating content that is compelling?

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/21/five-questions-help-navigate-social-trifecta/feed/0eCommerce Café: Andy Taylorhttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/17/ecommerce-cafe-andy-taylor/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/17/ecommerce-cafe-andy-taylor/#respondMon, 17 Jul 2017 09:19:13 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14678At SMX Advanced, we spoke with Merkle’s Assistant Director of Research Andy Taylor, who also spoke on the Mad Scientist panel with our founder Andreas. Catch the full interview behind the scenes, where Andy weighs in on the future of Google’s roadmap, KPIs to prioritize, and the reality behind agencies in the SEM industry.

At SMX Advanced, we spoke with Merkle’s Assistant Director of Research Andy Taylor, who also spoke on the Mad Scientist panel with our founder Andreas. Catch the full interview behind the scenes, where Andy weighs in on the future of Google’s roadmap, KPIs to prioritize, and the reality behind agencies in the SEM industry.

Full Transcript

ANDREAS: Andy, great to have you here. Could you explain to us a little bit what do you do at Merkle?

ANDY: Sure. I’m the Associate Director of Research, and so I’m responsible for just analyzing how different data trends are taking hold on the digital marketing channels that we manage. A lot of that is in paid search, but also cross-display advertising, comparison shopping engines, pretty much any major digital marketing channel, I tend to take a broad look at how our advertisers are performing.

ANDREAS: You saw that Google recently shared its product road map on Google Marketing Next, and there are many things like custom in-market audiences, data-driven attribution in general, I think, if you take a look at the market, you see that everything goes into the AI direction. AI is taking over. What do you think are the implications on our industry, on the long run?

ANDY: Over the past few years, if you look back at Google’s past announcements, they’ve kind of always been geared towards these automated options that Google comes out with either expanding the use of the dynamic search ads, or expanding their automated bidding tools and so on. I think this is just, kind of, a natural progression of that push, that Google wants to make to go ahead and create tools that can allow advertisers to turn exclusively to Google for their campaign management, and try to use Google’s information as best as they can in terms of managing campaigns. In terms of what that means for the industry, certainly, it’s long been a concern that’s going to, at some point, disintermediate agencies and high-level campaign managers. But I think, really, what will end up happening is, it will just disintermediate the worst tools out there. And so, if you have very high value bidding platforms or campaign management solutions, then you’re still going to have a place in the paid search world of the future, but it’s really those, kind of, lower level campaign management tools that are going to go away as Google’s tools become even better and they start incorporating things like AI and machine learning into their automated tools.

ANDREAS: From a people perspective, employee perspective, what do you think will happen? So, we have less people in the future working in our industry…?

ANDY: Right now, it seems that way. I hesitate to say for sure that, you know, there won’t be new opportunities that will present themselves, that will require more people over time. And so, certainly, every industry is moving towards less people in it, because a lot of jobs can be automated. And so, certainly, from the looks of it, we should expect a leaner industry in the future, but there can certainly be new opportunities that require a lot of heavy lifting from humans, and so that could totally reverse that trend towards fewer people.

ANDREAS: How would you position the agencies on the one hand or tool providers on the other end in this environment?

ANDY: I think, on the agency side, you need top-level people who are doing great work, that’s a huge value add from the agency side, it’s just having somebody constantly looking into account performance, so really, training your people up and having really smart campaign management day-to-day is going to be key to proving your value as an agency. From a tool provider standpoint, you really just have to create the best tool as possible out there. I mean, that’s the best way to guarantee yourself a place in the search industry world and, so, just try to make whatever it is you’re focusing on is as best as it can be.

ANDREAS: Merkle’s working with several large ecommerce retailers. What KPIs would you recommend a retailer to use, and how does this compare to the reality?

ANDY: So the long-standing KPI of choice is return on ad spend. And so, that does lack a little bit of nuance in terms of things that you can bake in at this point. Things like margin, to get more profitability, as opposed to just sales revenue. Things like customer acquisition and incremental value of your advertising, and so there’s a number of ways you can bake that in. You can shoot for cost per new customer acquisition, you can try to bake in lifetime value, in which you assign greater value to an order from a newer customer because you believe that ad click is going to produce clear revenue in the long run, than what it produced directly. And so, in that way, try to make your targets as targeted to your overall business goals as possible, which, historically, have been profitability and gaining new customers.

ANDREAS: If you run ad campaigns today, you just take plain numbers and you assume that this is the true impact of these campaigns, but we do not really know what the real incrementality of these ad campaigns is. In other words, what would happen if you just shut them down. It’s even more difficult when it comes to retargeting. So, if you target website visitors, part of them will have, of course, made that decision already, and they just take it as a shortcut at buying. Do we live in a world of illusion where we don’t want to confess to ourselves that we lack a lot of knowledge, and that we, in the end, make decisions out of gut feeling?

ANDY: I’d say that’s true. There is a lot of false confidence in paid search, because you can track so many different metrics, and you feel like you have the full picture, but at the end of the day, like you said, it’s very difficult to, without doing extensive testing, understand what the incremental impact of your ads is. And so, obviously, there’s some cost to setting those types of tests up. It takes up your time, and analyzing those tests, things like that keep some advertisers from even going down that path, and so they just take the performance metrics at face value. But I think advertisers are steadily getting smarter and smarter about trying o figure that out. Trying to test when is that actually producing incremental value for them, versus when it’s just being attributed with driving value that really came from other places.

ANDREAS: I sometimes have the impression that it’s kind of an alliance of different people. It’s the agency, who loves to spend more money, drive a bigger return, so they will never say, ‘My retargeting isn’t effective.’ Then, it’s the guys managing marketing. They see the great numbers coming in, and they don’t want to go to their boss and tell them, ‘Look, I’m wasting your money for years but I’m not telling you. And it’s the boss who has sold these results to the CEO, and he also doesn’t want to get back. So, it’s kind of – everyone somehow knows this is not all true, but no one really wants to lift the carpet.

ANDY: Sure. And so, yeah, I think there are a lot of incentives to be disingenuous about how confident you are in performance results, certainly. I think people, like you list of, there’s a lot of stakeholders that benefit from the numbers looking the way they look, and so to say, ‘We need to reduce spend because we’re not actually driving value with this ad, with this audience.’ – certainly it’s not going to be a popular decision across all of the stakeholders in a particular situation. But I like to think that, at the end of the day, most people are fairly upstanding, at least, about trying to be ethically sound in how they present numbers. I mean, certainly there are some cases where that’s not true and you see it published in the industry, very ridiculous case studies and disingenuous numbers. But I think, for the most part, I think a lot of people are trying to get better about being better at measuring things, but at the same time I think the knowledge to do that well is still lacking at this point. We’re just gradually getting there.

ANDREAS: I think one of the best examples, and you still probably see this being around, is blended KPIs on brand and non-brand, where some high-level executives are satisfied with whatever, ROEs of 5, but they have no clue that it’s just driven by a brand which would come in anyways. Otherwise they would have shut everything down for ages already. But no one wants to talk about it.

ANDREAS: It’s kind of disappearing, because marketing is getting a little bit smarter, but we still see this sometimes.

ANDY: Yeah. I agree. And there are definitely some basic things that need to be going down in terms of splitting brand vs non-brand, at least trying to segment audience vs non-audience, even if you’re not going to turn ads off to a particular audience, at least seeing how that audience performs relative to everyone else and trying to adjust your targets, things like that. Yeah, there’s certainly some boxes that need to be checked in order for you to count as being at least somewhat ethically sound in how you’re presenting your performance, and putting those numbers up the food chain.

ANDREAS: When you launch campaigns for new clients, when you are close to reveal, what are the low hanging fruits, what are the key deficiencies you see in the campaigns when you start?

ANDY: Sure. I mean, it totally depends on the account, I would say. If you’re talking an e-commerce account, certainly Google Shopping is now a huge share of traffic, so that would be the first campaigns we’d take a look at. I think you guys see, like, 80% of all traffic coming from shopping, for our data, I think we see about 76% non-brand coming from Google Shopping now, so that’s going to be the first place we look for in an e-commerce account, and try to identify any products that need to be split out as their targets, see if there’s possibilities to break out several campaigns in a kind of query map, to get any brand traffic to a shopping campaign and then get any manufacturer-specific traffic to a different shopping campaign – and so to try and segment the best you can, see if you can get even more value out of those. On the text ad side of things, certainly just making sure they have all their key words built out. Making sure that keyword negatives are up to date, and you’re illuminating as much poor matching traffic as possible, whether that traffic is coming through close variants or broad match, or what have you. And then also just evaluating the bidding and how efficient you are across different segments of your account. So, has the desktop return on ads been the same as phone and tablet, and are all of the different categories within your product selection all performing at the same return of ad spend, or the same profitability, or whatever KPI it is that that advertiser is shooting for.

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/17/ecommerce-cafe-andy-taylor/feed/0The Key to Good Feed Managementhttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/15/key-good-feed-management/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/15/key-good-feed-management/#respondSat, 15 Jul 2017 13:38:38 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14757So, you have this fantastic e-Commerce website and are ready to drive some customers that are in search of the products you sell using PLAs, but how do you get started? Lucky for you, the powerful information that fuels your website with products can be repurposed to drive qualified traffic to your site through PLAs.

So, you have this fantastic e-Commerce website and are ready to drive some customers that are in search of the products you sell using PLAs, but how do you get started?

Lucky for you, the powerful information that fuels your website with products can be repurposed to drive qualified traffic to your site through PLAs. And it all starts with a data feed of your products.

Getting a Data Feed and managing it

Many platforms nowadays have ways to create an Export Feed of your product data. Make sure to send your product feeds on a regular basis to the channels you are marketing to. Otherwise, you may be sending traffic to a product that is out of stock or miss out on advertising the newest products listed on your site.

The most popular platforms can even send this feed directly to the marketing channel where you want to advertise your products. However, this isn’t recommended, because your website has some additional valuable data that could be beneficial in marketing to your prospects. This is where feed optimization comes into play.

Importance of Feed Optimization

There is much to be said about channel specific feed optimization, but for sake of time we’ll let you in on a few of the key optimizations that will enhance your feed. First, having unique keyword rich titles are essential to matching a variety of search queries to get in front of your target audience. Look to see that your titles have a noun that represents each product. Sometimes the data which is extracted from the site may not have ‘shirt’ tied to that product in the title because on a website shirt doesn’t need to be in the title, however, it will help advertising channel increase the relevancy of the product to search queries.

Second, are your products categorized as granularly as possible? We’ve seen numerous feeds with either incorrect or missing data that makes categorization complex and arduous, thus some merchant’s will use a more generic categorization instead of the more granular category.

Lastly, review how you are using your feed to fuel the front end of your campaigns. If you are advertising on Google or Bing, you can adjust the structure of a field called ‘Product_Type’ to closely align with how you want to group and segment your products differently. Thus, being able to bid differently on different product groups depending on performance. The other fields to keep in mind are custom labels. These can be used for a variety of data such seasonality, margins, pricing buckets, performance groupings, and more to improve performance.

Common Feed issues

Through the years, we have seen a wide variety of issues. Some that are based on the data available as well as where the necessary data is living. That may be their website, business intelligence, and/or merchandising systems.

Here is just a quick sample of the many issues we run across:

Feed Formatting

Each marketing channel has specific formatting requirements. If the feed doesn’t match all the requirements, then some of your products won’t get in front of potential customers.

HTML characters

As you’ve gone to pages, have you sometimes seen weird characters such as ‘&reg;’, then you’ve come across HTML characters. These can lead to confusion and just plain look bad.

Multiple Data Sources/Missing Data

This one we can spend hours on so we’ll give some of the top reasons we see missing or incomplete data as well as the need to get data from multiple sources. Depending on the business and how new products come into a business, sometimes human error and speed cause data to become incorrect or missed completely. Another reason is a business may have multiple database systems and not all fields talk to one another about a product, thus sometimes different fields aren’t available.

Missing Nouns

This one is the most common because many businesses’ data about a product’s title is the same as their website. Thus, the product title is sometimes missing a noun because the website landing page for a pair of shoes doesn’t need to have ‘shoe’ in the title for a visitor to understand they are seeing a show. However, it is extremely important in the feed to have robust, keyword rich titles.

About Feedonomics

Feedonomics has created a software solution that can correct the above common issues and enhance a merchant’s data feeds quickly and at scale. Whether you have a handful of products to millions of SKU’s, we have a team of analysts ready to manage and optimize feeds fuel businesses online marketing efforts.

Feedonomics is committed to simplifying eCommerce with expedited and optimized feed management and delivery. Born in the cloud, tested and tweaked in the trenches, Feedonomics solves the technical, usability, and pricing problems of existing alternatives. It supports all major search engines, shopping platforms, and marketplaces in the industry. Feedonomics services a variety of verticals such as eCommerce, hospitality, travel, and job boards.

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/15/key-good-feed-management/feed/0eCommerce Café: Frederick Vallaeyshttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/13/ecommerce-cafe-frederick-vallaeys/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/13/ecommerce-cafe-frederick-vallaeys/#respondThu, 13 Jul 2017 09:25:31 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14682Last month we attended the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle…meaning we also had the pleasure of digging into the state of Product Ads and eCommerce with Adwords evangelist and Optmyzr CEO, Frederick Vallaeys. Check out the full interview below. Direct Youtube link. To stay tuned with Frederick, follow him on Twitter, @SiliconVallaeys. Full Transcript ANDREAS: Fred,

Last month we attended the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle…meaning we also had the pleasure of digging into the state of Product Ads and eCommerce with Adwords evangelist and Optmyzr CEO, Frederick Vallaeys. Check out the full interview below.

To stay tuned with Frederick, follow him on Twitter, @SiliconVallaeys.

Full Transcript

ANDREAS: Fred, great to have you here. Could you explain what Optimizer does, and also what your role at Optimizer is?

FREDERICK: Yea, so, I’m one of the co-founders of Optimizer and CEO, and we have a tool to make agency life much simpler and much more efficient. So, if you’re an agency or a PPC expert, there’s certain things you want to do in PPC, that are very time-consuming – like building app shopping campaigns, something you guys know a lot about. And so rather than taking days to do it manually, we have tools and specialty workflows to make it a 5-minute process, so you can actually do testing and things they want to do, but usually don’t have time to do.

ANDREAS: And what’s your personal role?

FREDERICK: So, as a CEO, but what I actually do at the company? So, obviously I was an evangelist for Google, so I had a lot of connections in the industry. So, I still do a lot of marketing, speaking, blogging, just kind of to make sure the customers know about who we are, what we do and then my team handles a lot of the engineering and operations to make sure that, once the customer comes in, they’re happy. But I set the strategy and the direction.

ANDREAS: OK. We just saw that Google shared its product road map on Google Marketing Next, and there are things like custom in-market audiences and data-driven attribution, so we see that AI is taking over. What do you think are the implications on our industry in the long run?

FREDERICK: Yeah, I think it’s this continuous shift that we’re seeing and even when I was working on quality score at Google, that was already machine learning, at a very early stage, and it’s getting much more sophisticated. But I think the realities as account managers, we’ve always played this funny role where we had this great advertising platform on the one side, and we had all these customers on the other side that want to buy our stuff. And, basically, as account managers, we’ve been that middle man who connected those two systems together. Now, a lot of that work is being taken over by computers, and a lot of it is very mathematical and data-driven. So it makes sense to have computers do it. And, so, I think, for us, as ‘’marketers’’, we probably actually need to become marketers again more so than data analysts, because that data, that’s going to be handled by the computers and, really, what we need to figure out is, well, what kind of a message resonates with a consumer, right? And the computer will figure out, ‘This is the message for Amy. This is the message for Fred.’, but we still have to feed the machine the different options and that’s what we’ll do much more of. And, at some level, I think it’s also kind of the self-driving cars that you see, when we see you’re still required to put a human in the driver seat to oversee and make sure you don’t run over somebody. And to some degree, I think we’re going to have that same role, to oversee the system and make sure that we steer them in the right direction when they don’t fully visualize what’s going on with the accounts.

ANDREAS: Doesn’t Google, to some extent, disintermediate and is there need for agencies or tool providers on the long run and how would you position, on the one hand, an agency and, on the other hand, a tool provider?

FREDERICK: That’s the thing, right? So, Google is very much a company about scale, about technology and humans are this thing that you need to put in that flow at some point, but the less they have to, I think, they would almost prefer it at some level. And it makes it very interesting for what does it mean for our careers as account managers, tool vendors, agencies. But I think it will evolve and I think there are still things, even like Jerry Dischler said yesterday at his keynote, that humans will simply do better than machines. So, it’s going to be a shifting of roles, more towards the creative, more towards figuring out what are the insights and then what are the strategies that we take as a result of these insights, but leave the eventual number crunching and very specific… So, basically, if you think about bid management, the bid management used to be super simple, right? You basically set the CPC and that was it, but now you have all these bid modifiers and they all stack on top of each other, so even if you’re only managing five different bid modifiers, while as a human, when you have a million key words, there’s so many combinations now, you can’t stay on top of that any more. So, that’s what we should back away from, because we’re humans, and just let the machines figure it out. But the machines are often really good when there’s large data sets and for many advertisers the reality is they may not have that much data. And, so, for them to be able to see if the machine’s doing a good job there, because what’s happening is relatively similar to other advertisers or to things that Google and AI can figure out. You know, let Google handle them. The stuff where Google’s dropping the ball, you should be on top of it, you should see it and you should take back that control. And, so, I think that’s something we’re going to be doing for many years to come.

ANDREAS: Can you mention a specific example where you see that Google won’t get involved, where’s Google dropping the ball?

FREDERICK: Honestly, bid management, flexible bid strategies, a lot of people are very happy in the beginning and then there always comes a day, this is almost in 100% of cases, there always comes a day when, for some reason, the machine doesn’t figure it out and the results just tank. And that could be seasonality that Google is not picking up on quickly enough. In those situations we have to take back that manual control and the scary thing for me is whenever you have a black box that doesn’t tell you what it’s doing, we don’t know why it’s failing all of a sudden, right? And if you as a human have stepped back so far that you have no clue anymore what’s happening, what do you do on that day? You basically get to turn it off or on. That’s it. And if you turn it off, now what you do? Now you have to actually go and figure it out. Listen, let’s understand, even if the machine’s doing the bidding, it a day of weak performance a big indicator of likely conversion rates? So, if the machine starts to fail, I at least know what I can recreate to leverage some of those insights that we’ve had from the machine over the past couple of months or years. The other great example is Google had this project to automatically write ad texts and this was for very small advertisers, certain verticals, so you could imagine a plumbing company, if it’s the plumber himself, he’s not that good at writing ad texts, hadn’t thought about it, okay, so why doesn’t the Google do that? Well, the problem was that Google would make so many, and all the ads would start looking the same. And machine learning and Artificial Intelligence actually needs variety to learn. If everything becomes the same, then it’s hard for it to learn. That’s where the human element still comes into play. And you go to these sessions, I don’t know, I actually don’t believe this necessarily works, but people pull on emotional triggers in ads, where they try to get really fancy with the ad, it’s supposed to be really relevant and giving information, they try to be more gimmicky. Some people claim this works, some people think it doesn’t work, but at least this is the variety that allows us to figure out A/B testing and what we should do more of and what we should do less of.

ANDREAS: If you take a look at the key growth driver of Google in e-commerce, they are exactly cutting out this last remaining variable, which you could influence before.

FREDERICK: Which is the ad, right?

ANDREAS: Exactly.

FREDERICK: But at least you still have, I suppose, the title and the description, but it’s mostly the title that will show up.

ANDREAS: We still like experiments when they cut off the title and just show the brand.

FREDERICK: Obviously PLA is a thing, Mary Meeker was saying 52% of all clicks on Google were e-commerce, so, it’s scary but it’s a thing, and I’m sure you see this in your business quite a bit, too – a lot of advertisers who are not equipped with good tools just get very few bids across shopping apps. So again, to trust Google to do that bid management for them, it doesn’t always go right. It doesn’t always update, right? And you may know something about your business, like say that you’re selling shoes. Maybe size 10 and a half sounds way better than a size 11 online. Maybe because your stores mostly don’t carry the half sizes. Or they don’t carry the odd sizes, let’s say, size 15 for men. I’ve got to go store, and exactly find a lot of choice there, but online it’s a great sell, it’s a great return on ad spend, because it’s really hard to find it in the physical store. Right? And that’s an insight you could have as a big shoe retailer, big sporting company. And maybe the machine doesn’t pick up on that.

ANDREAS: You work with retailers. What KPIs do you recommend them to use? And how does this compare to the reality of daily business of ecommerce KPIs?

FREDERICK: When it comes to KPIs, return on ad spend, that’s the obvious starting point. The tricky thing is always where do we set the return on ad spend? Do we pick out for margins, do we just have the same case, ROI starting for all of our products? Even if you have it same for all your products, what is your presumed profitability? So, I think people make a lot of assumptions, ‘Hey, we need to get 500% return on ad spend.’

ANDREAS: Where does it come from? Just fell from the sky? Why isn’t it 450? Or 550?

FREDERICK: Yeah. And that’s the thing, that’s the disconnect. I think a lot of account managers just take direction from the executives, and the executives will not necessarily know how to make the right numbers. So, yeah, you get into these funny situations where people are probably not getting the right value. So I think that some of the announcements that Google made at Marketing Next, around data attribution and data-driven models, that’s really very interesting to me, because it allows you as an advertiser to really build an attribution model based on the reality of what’s happening in the real world. Too many models, too many classical attributions, that’s based on a lot of assumptions, a lot of incorrect assumptions, so it’s undervaluing things here, it’s overvaluing other things, so I’m really excited about data-driven. But the one component that data-driven still misses is what is the margin on my product, right? You made a really interesting point, with your session at SMX, which is sometimes the bid is your lever to get more success, but often times you could have had a tiny decrease in the price of the product, which is smaller than bid increase would’ve done, and that would have actually given you more traffic, because price is such a big factor in ranking, impressions, all of that.

ANDREAS: We run our campaigns. We track performance and we kind of want to believe that this is the true value of our ad campaigns. But when we actually don’t really know what the incrementaility of these ads is, when it comes to retargeting – that’s even more complicated, because your target customers, which have visited your website, and part of them, of course, have made their purchase decision already, and they use your ads as shortcuts. So, what are we actually able to measure, or are we rather living an illusion where we make decisions on the gut feeling and we justify them with data?

FREDERICK: Yeah, I think there is, definitely, a lot of illusion there. But, honestly, we’re doing the best we can with the information we have. So, we try to get the clear picture. We do have to make those assumptions, and that’s why it’s so exciting for tool vendors and agencies like us.

ANDREAS: Let me quickly challenge this, because there is a situation where sometimes all the different participants have incentives to not raise questions about things. And because, if you have a retargeting campaign and you’re delivering great numbers, if it’s an agency, they ask, ‘Should we question these numbers?’ Their marketing executive is selling these numbers to the CEO, he would also not question them, so eventually we all know it may not be true, but no one wants to really dig deeper into it.

FREDERICK: I completely agree, and so, I’ve literally seen agencies when they come up with these crazy metrics, where they’re basically counting everything twice, like consistent conversions and remarketing… So you’ve already paid in some way for that traffic, and now you’re putting a huge value on that – that’s not the correct way to look at it. But, you’re right, good numbers that you can show to your executives makes them happy, but also I think agencies that will survive are the ones who actually do ask some of these questions, like you’re proposing, which is, ‘Let’s dig a little bit deeper.’ And maybe you’re presenting these numbers to the executives to make them happy, but at the same time you’re doing some experimentation to see what is the true value that we’re getting. Because at some point, somebody will get to that next level, measure it more directly, and then they will have the actual numbers that make sense, and all of these businesses looking at the wrong numbers, they might start to hurt, their margins will start to fall. And one thing that’s really interesting, too. In the shopping spaces, I don’t know your opinion on this, but small players, small vendors don’t have the efficiencies of big players like jet.com, or Amazon.

ANDREAS: Less data?

FREDERICK: They have less data, but their business is not as efficient, right? So they may have to pay more for shipping because they have to negotiate it additionally.

ANDREAS: Don’t have the same buying power and so on.

FREDERICK: Exactly. And so, at what level is it not about – the key words – at what point is it not about your landing pages or your bids, but at what point is it about, ‘Listen, you really just need to go back to your business and make that more efficient, because that’s where you’re going to pick up more results.’ But, again, that’s a question nobody likes to ask, because it’s a much harder question to answer, whereas changing the bid – boom. It’s done. Figuring out how to negotiate better with the USPS for delivery fees, that’s hard. Right?

ANDREAS: When you take on clients, what are the lowest hanging fruits usually, what’s your starting point?

FREDERICK: So, we do a lot of one click optimizations, a lot of keyword campaigns. So, looking at your query data, often times we see lots of nuggets in there, nuggets of gold. Converting queries that you haven’t added to your account, your keyword list. And so, some of the less sophisticated agencies will say, ‘Well, why should I even do that?’ Because, until you put it in as a keyword, you can’t actually control the bid or be creative, right? So, add stuff to your account like positive keywords, negative keywords. We also see a lot of negative keywords opportunities, so a lot of people still use broad match or phrase match, which will still show up on different queries. And you have these spikes and random traffic around certain events that happen, and it’s completely irrelevant. And you often don’t pick up on them very quickly unless you do a very semantic analysis of the keywords. And we can do that very quickly, so we can do it in 30 seconds, and can tell you, ‘These are the keywords that you probably should add as negatives.’ A/B testing for ads – I think that’s becoming less and less relevant as Google gets better and better at automating it. But that said, I see a lot of accounts where people just literally never remove underperforming ads. So, again, it’s an illusion. They see, ‘Yeah, we have 4 ads, one in every ad group.’ But, yeah, Google has already optimized it, and 98% of your impressions go to this one, and these other 3, Google doesn’t care about, right? So you’re not really testing, you just thought you were testing them. Stuff like that, we see a lot of.

ANDREAS: Great. Thanks a lot for your time, very insightful.

FREDERICK: Thanks for having me. Thanks.

ANDREAS: It was really good, good content.

Interest piqued? Frederick and Andreas will be discussing Andreas’ tests in Google Shopping reverse engineering in an upcoming webinar on July 27, 1:00 PM EST. Sign up today!

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/13/ecommerce-cafe-frederick-vallaeys/feed/0Bridging the gap between Marketing and Merchandisinghttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/04/bridging-gap-marketing-merchandising/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/04/bridging-gap-marketing-merchandising/#respondTue, 04 Jul 2017 16:26:04 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14583Some may call the concept of the 4Ps of Marketing – Product, Price, Place, Promotion – outdated, but every iteration that adds more complexity to the Marketing concept just reinforces how crucial it is that these four elements work together. However, what the 4Ps comprehensively describe as Marketing goes way beyond what your typical operational

Some may call the concept of the 4Ps of Marketing – Product, Price, Place, Promotion – outdated, but every iteration that adds more complexity to the Marketing concept just reinforces how crucial it is that these four elements work together.

However, what the 4Ps comprehensively describe as Marketing goes way beyond what your typical operational ‘marketing’ department covers. Most everyday marketing teams focus on the Promotion-P, be it media buys or digital advertising or something similar.

The CMO’s task then is to bring together the other three Ps into a holistic approach to Marketing. Two Ps that have stratified out into their own distinct departments are Merchandising (Placement) and Buying (Pricing). The final P – Product – is generally determined by your company, though in market-oriented companies the CMO would have a say on the product-market-fit.

Merchandisers – guardians of the Placement-P, ensure that products appear in the right store/website, at the appropriate time and in the correct quantities. Similarly, the Pricing-P is typically covered by a specialized buying department, sourcing and pricing goods in close cooperation with merchandisers.

Because of these silos, Marketing is not as homogeneous on the working level as the CMO’s overall responsibility might require and the usual communication letdowns and friction losses that happen between any two departments will inevitably occur.

In this post, we’ll discuss the steps CMOs can take to help bridge the rift between everyday Promotional Marketing and Merchandising/Pricing.

Why it’s important to bridge the gap

Communication letdowns and friction losses are never a good thing, but in the CMO’s realm, they have the potential to seriously harm his/her ability to deliver the desired results and efficiency targets.

When we mentioned above that the buying department relies on frontline input from the Merchandiser to source the right products and quantities, that exchange has established because of the significant working capital involved with stocking a season’s worth of merchandise.

Media budgets are the second most significant cost chunk in the marketing operation, but often no similar exchange is in place between Merchandising and Promotion.

In a 2016 qualitative survey, Crealytics found that many companies’ Merchandising and Promotion departments had no formal way of aligning on goals and attributing results. Even worse, most had not even realized the value that can be gained from exchanging data with the other function in the first place.

Even just two data points from the Merchandisers’ domain – stock levels and competition prices – have a vast potential to make media buying so much more effective.

Why would any promotion department spend media budget on products that will soon go out of stock – even without further assistance?

In the age of almost total price transparency on the Internet (and Google’s price bias), why would any promotion department face the uphill battle of promoting products that can be bought cheaper just one click to the right?

What can be gained from data sharing and cooperation

Stock level and competition prices are textbook examples of how sharing information between Marketing Promotion and Merchandising can produce more effective strategies and efficient promotions.

For example, when the promotion department has access to stock levels, advertising budgets can go exclusively to products that are actually in-stock. Our research has shown again and again that a surprisingly high amount of budget is spent on products that are out of stock or very low.

On price, Crealytics research found that the Google ranking algorithm anticipates user preference for cheaper prices and massively favors cheaper-than-competition-offers in terms of AdRank – resulting in lower cost and better search result page positions of competitively priced offerings. If promotion departments had the consumer’s perspective of price transparency (as most merchandising teams do), they might decide to allocate budgets to products that are most competitive in the marketplace.

Conversely, understanding how much the Promotion department needs to push a product to get it to sell will offer the Buying department a new data point to consider when determining product prices. Competitive pricing can usually produce a better margin for the business – given the lower advertising costs – than promoting the hell out of an overpriced product.

If Marketers see that their products are noncompetitively priced, they can either

Take the product out of being advertised in Google Shopping (if CRs are low) or

Find out from merchandising colleagues whether that product line sells well anyway and whether it makes sense to lower prices

While the benefits of cooperation are clear and logical, organizational implementation challenges and entrenched work habits provide significant barriers to adoption.

How to bridge the gap effectively

For some time now, we have been working with our clients on taking the data we get as part of Marketing Promotion and applying it towards achieving wider business objectives. In doing so, we have struggled with organizational barriers, just like everyone else.

Rather than further trying to break up silos within marketing organizations, we decided to launch a beta feature in our sphere of influence – the Promotion space. Our feed-based product advertising management platform now features Price Advisor, a tool that automatically researches your price position compared to the competition in Google Shopping. It thus empowers PPC-managers to begin implementing and experimenting with competition-based pricing based strategies.

Beyond the operational impact in PPC, we hope this step might get the ball rolling in internal communication. PPC managers now have a powerful justification for underperforming campaigns – which, if used, will lead to further probing from the business. By demonstrating how overall margins can be improved, PPC managers can get buy-in from senior management leading to increased cooperation across teams.

Re-pricing might run counter to conventional marketing wisdom and even stoke fears of a price race to the bottom. But as always in life, it is not so much about the tool, but about the strategies of using it. To that end, we regularly share our latest insights and experimentation results with our clients to come up with practices that will work for them.

If you are interested in using stock level data and take the next step in unlocking value from Merchandising data to drive up your margins, we would be happy to discuss our new Price Advisor feature with you.

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/07/04/bridging-gap-marketing-merchandising/feed/0Get the product price right for Google Shoppinghttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/06/30/get-product-price-right-google-shopping/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/06/30/get-product-price-right-google-shopping/#respondFri, 30 Jun 2017 13:34:00 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14564New Crealytics feature: Price Advisor Google Shopping takes product price transparency to a new level. Unsurprisingly, people tend to click on the cheaper product when the same product is sold by multiple retailers. This human tendency, means that Google’s learning algorithms will often surface the cheapest products first even if they don’t have the highest

New Crealytics feature: Price Advisor

Google Shopping takes product price transparency to a new level. Unsurprisingly, people tend to click on the cheaper product when the same product is sold by multiple retailers. This human tendency, means that Google’s learning algorithms will often surface the cheapest products first even if they don’t have the highest bid.

The result, is that if you sell the same brands or products as someone else, where your product price falls in relation to your competitors, heavily influences your traffic and conversion volumes. Product price becomes, next to the bid, the most important factor to attract shoppers on Google Shopping.

Which product variant is a shopper more likely to click?

That is very different to Text Ads, which do not allow to users to compare prices so easily. With product pricing decisions being so hugely important to channel performance, there seems to be a dilemma:

If you price your products too high, you will lose on clicks and subsequent sales.

On the other hand, if you price your products too low, you will lose margins and profitability.

While price levels are very visible to individual shoppers, it’s nearly impossible for PPC managers to monitor these at scale. Which is ironic because those decisions are hugely important to channel performance.

Does this mean that you have to lower all your product prices and engage in a price wars? Not necessarily.

A way out of the price dilemma

To help solve the pricing problem, we analyzed thousands of online retail transactions. It turns out, that the products people click on in Google Shopping are not necessarily the products they end up buying. Only a third of shoppers actually buy the product they clicked on. Sometimes, they buy from the same brand, the same category or a different brand and category all together.

Based on this information, we figured out that the most important role of Google Shopping is to get shoppers to your site when they express relevant search-intent. By discounting a few selected high impact products with a lot of search volume, you can attract more shoppers to your site and then up-sell or cross-sell to them, thereby preserving your margins.

However, this is challenging to do. Beyond identifying the products with high demand, you need to monitor the competitive landscape systematically. The more products you offer, the harder this gets.

Get important price recommendations automatically

The Crealytics Price Advisor does solves both of those issues for you. It identifies a few selected high impact products and gives price recommendations based on the competitive landscape and search data.

Using Price Advisor you can:

Identify high impact products that are too expensive – lowering prices for these helps you to acquire new shoppers to your site.

Identify high impact products that are too cheap – raising prices for these helps you to sell at higher margins without the risk of losing market share.

All Crealytics customers can use the Price Advisor for UK, US or German market if their feed contains valid GTINs. If you have any questions, thoughts, comments or just want to chat, feel free to reach out to your Crealytics account manager to learn more.

Not a Crealytics customer yet? To learn more about how our Smart Shopping Automation tool can help you get the most from your campaigns, get in touch with us using the form below and we’ll be more than happy to tell you all about it!

]]>https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/06/30/get-product-price-right-google-shopping/feed/0How to determine price competitiveness in product advertisinghttps://crealytics.com/blog/2017/06/27/determine-price-competitiveness-product-advertising/
https://crealytics.com/blog/2017/06/27/determine-price-competitiveness-product-advertising/#respondTue, 27 Jun 2017 09:22:00 +0000https://crealytics.com/?p=14469As we covered previously, how your price compares to that of your competitors has a huge impact on the success of your Shopping campaigns. Price your products too high and Google will display them lower in the paid results or refuse to show them at all. Price too low, and you lose margins – a

As we covered previously, how your price compares to that of your competitors has a huge impact on the success of your Shopping campaigns. Price your products too high and Google will display them lower in the paid results or refuse to show them at all. Price too low, and you lose margins – a race to the bottom is never fun.

The key to a good pricing strategy is to identify a few high-impact products and make sure that they are priced correctly within the competitive landscape. To do this, you’ll need a way of measuring how pricing affects your Product Advertising efforts on Google Shopping.

Focus on products with a lot of impressions, since these products play a huge role in acquiring new shoppers, a few key price adjustments can have a dramatic effect. Sounds simple in principle, but the reality is slightly more complicated.

Here’s how you can identify which products you should be monitoring, how to do that monitoring at scale and how to derive actionable insights from the data you collect.

Identify high-impact products

First off, you want to make sure your Product Feed contains valid GTINs. These will help you match your products with the products from your competition. Relying on some other matching criteria like the product name or description at scale will get you lots of mismatches and your data will need a lot of cleaning. You also want to ensure that the products you’re monitoring are in stock.

Next, you need to decide how many competitors a product needs to be relevant to you. We recommend only looking at products with at least three competitors. Any less than that and the conclusions you can draw on pricing aren’t going to be very reliable.

Your final criteria should be how many impressions each product has received in the last 30 days. Remember that you’re looking for products that are gateways to your website. The number you choose here will depend on a number of impressions your account gets in general, but a good place to start for most retailers is 300.

Product criteria

Valid GTIN

3 or more competitors in Shopping

>300 Impressions in the last 30 days

Once you’ve applied these product filters, you’ll be left with a list of products that have the potential to make a big impact on the overall success of your business. Now it’s time to compare your prices for these products to those of your competitors.

Gather intelligence

PPC Managers are typically short on time. So unless you have an automated solution, we’d recommend sorting your high-impact products even further. For the sake of simplicity, start with a top 20, then you can use one of these sources to find out how your competitors price these products:

Shopping Comparison Sites

Typically, each country has its own popular Shopping comparison site. For example, in the UK, common sites include ciao and pricerunner.

Price data vendors

You can buy price data from companies like PriceAPI.com. The advantage with this solution is that these companies offer programmatic access to their data via APIs, so you can run queries in bulk instead of entering each GTIN into a Shopping Comparison site.

Merchandising teams

Your merchandising team or buying department may already have a solution for monitoring price levels. They may be able to provide you with price data for the products you’ve selected.

Crealytics

As part of our Retail Intelligence Platform, we created the Price Advisor, which automatically identifies a few high impact products and gives price recommendations based on the competitive landscape and search data.

Actionable price insights

Once you’ve identified a list of high-impact products and found out where you rank in terms of the competition, you can separate these into two basic categories – too competitive and not competitive.

If you’re too competitive, it means that your product price is well below the next lowest price. In this case, you’ll likely want to recommend raising the price to a level that is still the most competitive but will deliver greater margins.

If you’re not competitive enough, it means that your product is significantly more expensive than the minimum or average price. In this case, you would want to recommend lowering the price of that product to something more competitive.

Here’s the million dollar question: By how much should you recommend changing the price?

Your exact formula will differ depending on your business and it’s objectives. However, a good formula is one that includes your price ranking; price difference from the minimum, maximum and average price; performance data and how aggressive or conservative you want your pricing strategy to be. Your formula should allow you to make informed pricing recommendations that don’t simply suggest you go straight to the lowest price. The final step is to take your newfound pricing insights to the relevant department.

If the pricing department agrees to change a few prices, it’s important to monitor the PPC performance of these products over time to understand exactly how the change affects performance. We recommend building your cohort filter in AdWords and observe how impressions, clicks, CPC and conversion rates change over time.